By Alistair Barr
Publication Date: 2025-12-10 10:00:00
In Silicon Valley, where bold technical bets abound, few bets look bolder than trying to break the grip of Nvidia‘s CUDA, a software stack that’s quietly become the operating system of the AI boom.
That’s what Modular, a startup founded by software gurus from Apple and Google, is trying to do.
Cofounders Chris Lattner and Tim Davis have spent decades building the software plumbing that sits beneath the modern tech industry. Lattner is famous for creating Apple’s Swift programming language. He also built the software underpinning Google’s TPU AI chips, with Modular cofounder Tim Davis.
They’re now aiming that expertise at CUDA itself. The attempt borders on madness, but it’s the kind of audacious project that could transform the AI industry.
“It’s seen by a lot of people as somewhat crazy,” said Kylan Gibbs, CEO of startup Inworld AI and a former product manager at Google DeepMind. “That’s where Chris has the advantage: He’s smart enough to actually know how to do it, and somewhat crazy enough to set out to do it.”
CUDA entrenched. Competition fragmented.
CUDA began life almost 20 years ago as a way to make graphics chips programmable. Today, it has grown into a multilayered software ecosystem — language, libraries, compilers, inference systems — that most AI companies rely on.
That success comes at a cost: Most of the industry is now optimized around a single vendor’s hardware. CUDA binds AI workloads to Nvidia GPUs. That is great for Nvidia,…
